The Tate Modern Gallery, despite the significant exhibition space at its disposal, has long experienced difficulties with an extraordinary influx of visitors. Therefore, at the beginning of last year, the director of the Tate Gallery, Sir Nicholas Serota, approached the architects of the original Tate Modern project with a request to develop a version of a new building that would remove some of the load from the main building.
Unlike the 1995 project, which stood out from other bids for its restraint, the 2006 project, a kind of "sequel", is distinguished by its scope and courage. A 70-meter thick stepped tower of thick glass will be added to the south of the reconstructed power plant, which has housed the Tate Modern since 2000. The new 11-storey building will be higher than the roof of the old building, so its completion will be visible from the north side - from the Thames, which faces the main facade of the gallery. The now familiar sight of London's landmarks will change, but this is the architects' intention: thus, a new semantic axis will be created: St. Paul's Cathedral, Millennium Bridge, Tate Modern, its famous Turbine Hall - and Tate Modern 2. And behind it - across a vast new area - the Southark area, which is gradually turning into an important cultural center of the capital of Great Britain.
Serota plans to open a new gallery building for the 2012 Olympics. In his opinion, it is necessary to create a counterbalance to the center of concentration of sports facilities, which is being formed by this time in East London, and to give everyone who came to the Olympics the opportunity to visit various new cultural institutions. Such a hub of cultural life may well become Sauzark, in which the Globus Theater, the National Theater, the Festival Hall concert hall - a total of about 20 different cultural institutions and leisure establishments - have appeared over the past ten years. By 2012, a new building for the Museum of Design, the headquarters of the Zaha Hadid Architectural Foundation, a multi-functional complex of four buildings designed by Richard Rogers is to be built there.
But even in such a bright neighborhood, Tate Modern 2 is unlikely to get lost: its architects took care of this. According to Jacques Herzog, the project is a cross between "a pyramid in the stage of disintegration and a pyramid that is still forming." Despite the fact that this is a fully glazed building facing south, and the ten exhibition galleries planned inside should have, for the most part, walls without unnecessary openings, these problems have been solved in terms of design and modern resource management technologies. There will be no overheating, since external insulation will be used; in winter the museum will be heated by groundwater and heat generated by the power station's transformer shop, which is still operating. Inside, the structure is as simple as possible: the reinforced concrete frame of supports and beams supports the floors with either protruding or extending to the center of the building edges.
In addition to exhibition halls, Tate Modern 2 will have six cafes and bars, two museum shops, several outreach rooms - and dedicated performance spaces. They will be located underground, in huge fuel tanks that the power plant used to use.
A wide staircase passing through all floors of the building will emphasize the logic of the development of the interior space of the new building of the museum.
The cost of the new project is 165 million pounds, which is equal to the first reconstruction project, but taking into account inflation this is a fifth more. The new building will have 23,000 sq. m of usable area, which will increase the Tate Modern space by 60%.
